In many ways, Philip Davis was up against it when he took on the task of writing Malamud's biography. When he asked Malamud's publisher, Roger Straus, what he thought of the idea, he was dismissive: “I think it's ridiculous. Saul Bellow was filet mignon, Malamud was hamburger” (201). For Straus, Malamud was so self-effacing that he did not “even have a life as such” (201), let alone one as rich and piquant as that of Bellow, his more illustrious contemporary. Malamud himself had written, in a letter to his friend Chester Garrison, “I don't know what any future biographer will do with me – I imagine little” (219), and in his novel about a professional biographer, Dubin's Lives (1979), that “all biography is ultimately fiction” (294).

No professional biographer himself, Davis is true to himself and to his subject in “plac[ing] the work above the life,” and in doing so he makes a compelling case for Malamud not only as a writer worthy of more recognition than is often given him these days, but as “a greater writer than he himself sometimes thought he was, precisely because of the tense closeness of the life and the work, and the struggle between them” (viii). Malamud also emerges in this book, however, as a much more colourful and complex figure than Straus gave him credit for: at times austere, ascetic, sententious, pompous, bombastic, manipulative, self-pitying, sentimental; at other times lively, mischievous, witty, sincere, compassionate, generous, courageous, impulsive.

At one point in the book Davis quotes a passage from Malamud's novel A New Life in which the protagonist, Levin, observes, “What an extraordinary only human thing to be in love!”, before commenting, “Malamud writes for those who are moved by the inclusion of that single word ‘only’ and know something of the difference it makes” (173). Davis is that reader par excellence – his own prose is perfectly attuned to the subtle semantic modulations of Malamud's, so that he is able, to adapt what he says of Malamud, to “grab [his] sentence[s] in the middle and stretch [them] vertically” (342), unpacking the elliptical, enigmatic formulations and unravelling the tangle of motives, often only implicitly or partially articulated, that characterize Malamud's life and work.

Davis's eye for the telling detail, often the result of one of Malamud's painstaking, compulsive revisions, makes him a powerful advocate of the pleasures of reading Malamud carefully. Time and again he detects the most minute, subterranean semantic vibrations (such as the unexpected inclusion of the word “only” in the phrase quoted above) and excavates the site of meaning thoroughly. Davis's sensitive readings of Malamud's works do not, however, blind him to the occasional insensitivity of the man. Davis records sympathetically and at the same time unsparingly Malamud's sometimes desperate struggle to mediate between what Philip Roth has called the “written and unwritten worlds,” and he writes movingly but also at times with a certain wry detachment of “the uses and costs to a life in the service of a serious vocation” (350). This is a wonderful book – one that restores Malamud's reputation as a writer and reveals a life at once more and less ordinary than expected.